Day: January 29, 2026, 3:32 PM

Retreat Defeat

Chill Evil, Prediction

I’m wondering if non-Muslims in Europe will eventually be forced to retreat from their current homes and create an Israel-like state somewhere in Western or Eastern Europe. Most likely. Maybe a stronghold can be created by consolidating Poland/Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia and some parts of Finland. If Russia is contained, that would be pretty militarily defensible against encroaching Islamization.

The real worry is that after Muslims take over France — which is almost inevitable — they will then have nuclear weapons.

The Islamization of Europe is going to be very bad news for everyone.

Some Ways Better

Chill Annoying, Evil

Even though computers were vastly worse back then, I miss the 1980s and early 1990s when there were 5-10 different OSes/computer types available in the home market, a good half-dozen GUIs with some significant market share, and corporations weren’t preventing you from being able to use your own computer to protect their bottom line.

It’s still amazing to me that there was enough propaganda saturation that the tech industry did manage to convince millions of people that having no control of their own computer and systems was optimal. What a propaganda coup. In a way, I admire it. Convincing millions upon millions of people to deliberately harm themselves while rabidly praising that harm is a real work of art in a Machiavellian sense.

But the end results sure are terrible for the non-droolers.

Rodin

Chill Rant

I’ve always known this, but people just cannot think credibly. Being able to think clearly and assess data, information and the world as it actually coheres is so rare that I can call to mind — maybe — five people in the entire world (of living, public-ish figures) who do this routinely.

I don’t even agree with all of them. Or even most of them most of the time. But they are thinking. Which is so incredibly rare that in a world of eight billion people that only five make the cut. Fuck, that’s grim.

A great example of this lack of cognitive capability is AI. Tons of people write about it. Loads of people have opinions. Few of them understand it or use it. Most have no clue other than (most of them) hate it. Here’s where the cognitive breakage occurs. To some extent the inverse is true of the cheerleaders but among the AI-haters, they are not able to separate these four very-much-disparate contentions:

1) A lot of the AI companies are scummy.

2) I personally hate AI.

3) AI is often misused.

4) And that in many contexts and for many use cases, AI works incredibly well and is improving rapidly all the time.

How, just how, can people not separate these drastically different postulates? And truly, I am not here to defend AI. It’s here and it’s not going anywhere. My aim is to attempt to reason — as much as is possible — about how very poorly nearly all of humanity cogitates. They just cannot do it. It is absolutely beyond them. High IQ, low IQ. It doesn’t matter. They cannot think in any real sense.

By the way, my list of the five living people who can actually, credibly think:

  • Zeynep Tufecki
  • Tyler Cowen
  • Nancy Cartwright
  • Murray Shanahan
  • Camille Paglia

Chill Links

Russia’s 1.2 million casualties in Ukraine dwarf all its conflicts since World War II, report says.

Algae blooms are expanding worldwide, Florida scientists say in first ever global study.

Milky Way is embedded in a 'large-scale sheet' of dark matter, which explains motions of nearby galaxies.

The origin story of syphilis goes back far longer than we thought.

Japan lost a 5-ton navigation satellite when it fell off a rocket during launch. Oopsie-doopsie.

Europe should be ‘realistic’ about tech sovereignty, says top chips exec.

Berlin’s push to favor its own arms-makers snarls Ukraine’s €90B EU loan.

Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years. A new study says the warranty does not mark the end, and performance can last for decades. Arrays built in the late 1980s still produced more than 80% of their original power.

I think Docker is Bad Actually. I think Kubernetes is bad and Flatpak is bad and Snaps are bad and App Stores are bad and the Wayland security model is also bad. Specifically, they’re bad for humans and human-scale computing.

Superfluids are supposed to flow indefinitely. Physicists just watched one stop moving.

Deforestation is drying out the Amazon rainforest faster than previously thought.